By Grace Whitmore ~
Turkish life is a peaceful rhythm of talk, scent of freshly baked hot bread freshly taken out of the oven, and soft ways of a thousand-year-old hammam. To live so carefree is not rush nor quickness but people closeness, dwelling in nature, and wellbeing culture at private and public levels.
Turkish culture—centuries in a nutshell at one’s fingertips expressed through multiculturalism—is an example of peace in otherwise deranged times. From the social need of a hammam to the peaceful rhythm of a shared meal, Turkish life is a life of here and now—a presence to have to do with working with beauty in ritual and practice.
Wellness Through Ritual and Relationship
Turkish well-being culture is less hammams or mats of yoga. It is a mindset since the Turkish bath, or hammam, is everywhere. Hammams are based in Rome and Byzantium, and scrubbing is only the beginning. Hammams are public refuges where the soul is fed, care is shed, and camaraderie born out of the golden quiet of marble corridors.
As The Turkish Culture Portal points out, such baths remain a part of so many lives, in so-called urban cities like Istanbul and Bursa, where people still relax and socialize. Hammam is sanctuary—where health is never something to be savored alone but something to be shared.
Nourishment with Purpose
Its second pillar of support is Turkish cuisine, rooted in identity, family, and well-being. Natural and fresh ingredients of food for cooking food are most likely bought at weekly local neighborhood bazars known as pazars. Head Mediterranean diet foods such as lentils, bulgur, eggplant, olive oil, and yogurt dominate the diet, whose positive impact on well-being to optimal functioning of heart and brain has rightfully been established.
But here, food is not fuel—it’s religion. There’ll be laden tables and steaming bowls of mercimek çorbası (lentil soup) or golden plates of börek piled high by family and friends. The communal courses are minicélébrations of society and culture, the Turkish credo: “Eat sweetly, speak sweetly.”
The Power of Community
From sand-blasted seaside sandy beach resorts to hill-town communities in the hills, community is the pre-eminent power of Turkish life. A cup of Turkish tea, sipped from a tulip-cup, so readily turns into an affair of sohbet hours—a much dearer tradition of dinner conversation after supper that is not lost. Such affairs as these, whatever the form—around dinner tables or village tea gardens—are evidence of the truth that belonging is the key to easily finding an elementary kind of happiness.
This unconventional definition of family. Neighborhood, shop owner, even strangerly. Families, for instance, go to old folks on Bayram holidays and go and hug and exchange sweets, threads that bind humans together. This is ordinary moral goodness of hospitality, one of open arms and shared bread.
Beauty in the Everyday
Turkish beauty does not stay locked within museums and galleries. It lies in painted ware, design-motif-pattern coffee cups, and hand-knotted carpets. Turkish craftsmen have a tradition more than a hundred and fifty years old in their backs and sustain it by trying to match the pretty and the useful. A Hereke carpet, for instance, is not merely a floor covering but an eyesight narrator with symbols and silk twisted around one another in harmony.
Nature is also the pageant’s culmination. The look-at-me photogenicity of the Aegean coastline, the rock hills of Cappadocia, steppe upon steppe of Anatolian plateau provide nature with a low-key but luminous backdrop. No poseurs, one can simply people-watch along and around the park or beach-pique along the shores—moments of body and mind idleness, best case.
We require Turkish life in this era of hyperconnection and perpetual flow. We can have it so we can learn how to move more slowly, how to hear bodies with richness, how to truly touch other human bodies and to be able to set out seeking beauty in the ordinaryness of things our hands do touch.
It’s not a way of life—it’s a mindset. A waking life wherein health is not an entitlement, but a right. Where human beings are not a privilege, but a necessity. And where one does not need to pretend to be gorgeous because they already are so in the unadulterated, plain beauty of the ordinary.
